A racy classroom

Talking about race with my students is always a bit of a challenge. Most of them, as I was at their age, are still cocooned in their comfortable, parent-passed-down, friend-confirmed ideologies. They don’t want to know more. They think they do and they’ll even say that they do, but they haven’t quite developed the cognitive skills yet to be able to actually desire a more complex way of thinking about culture and society, despite the fact that you can usually find those terms in every paragraph of their papers.

So, not only is it my job to teach them things, but to try and teach them why they should care about those things. Which is hard sometimes. Especially because “scientific research” shows that most of them (because of their age) are not even mentally developed enough to be able to think at such abstract levels.

Anyway. I found this comic via a friend on Facebook. At some point, I’ll figure out how to incorporate it into a lesson plan instead of just showing it to them and saying, “Now what?,” which was my initial impulse.